Everyone in town comes, and many from elsewhere, and it's an old friends
gathering where, as John McLennan says, "you keep encountering people you've
worked with not just once, but two or three times before."
John is ex-Mitel, ex-Rogers, ex-Bell employee and now president of AT& T Canada.
He works in Toronto, but goes home to Cape Breton on weekends. Toronto is a
good place to work, but you wouldn't want to live there. John MacDonald, another
scion of Cape Breton, who succeeded MacDonald as president of Bell, and now
runs Leitch Technology Corp. in Toronto, comes home on weekends to Ottawa.
Terry's festivity last week was disguised as a conference called NetVideoWorld,
and perhaps half of the hundreds of people there were genuinely interested in
whether net-video is for real or a variant of the dot-com sinkholes, popularly known
today as dot-bombs. With Alcatel, Nortel, JDS and other big optical networking boys
located here, there is a fast-growing cluster of net-video wannabes growing as
well.
The other half were there to find out what Terry is up to as he combines March
Networks, which he started when he owned Newbridge, with Mitel Networks, which
he started a quarter century ago with Mike Cowpland, then sold and has just
reacquired it with the bundle he got for selling Newbridge. It takes some figuring
out, but the short of it is that March-Mitel is into net-video.
The argument for net-video goes like this: billions of dollars have been invested in
broadband, the huge electronic/photonics transmission pipes that can deliver
megas and gigas and terras of whatever you can think of to fill them with. Capacity
is unrestrained, much exceeding the voice, data, net messaging and even TV
pictures that currently flow through it. The consequence is that costs and prices are
plummeting, new entrants to the field are cratering and even the Ma Bell-type
monopolies are seeing their once guaranteed returns much diminished.
What to do? The net-video argument that Terry puts is that "video is a bandwidth
hog." The more moving pictures sent over the infoway and the more interactivity that
can be stimulated as in, "I like those pictures, send me more and here are some
of mine" the faster the profits will flow.
Who needs all these pictures? How much are they willing to pay for them? I ask
myself these questions and the answers come. Not me. Not much.
But it's not me the net-video crowd is after, and maybe not you either, unless you're
a CEO, in which case, get back to work and stop spending your precious attention
on matters columnystical.
Entertainment and other consumer applications, such as scanning retail shelves
and ordering over distances, are not where net-video will make inroads. Consumer
habits are hard to change. Consumers are fickle. And they're price conscious
(cheap even).
At least initially, net-video killer apps are most likely to emerge in a business
context. Business is willing to look at ways to save money or make more (which are
the same thing) and will pay a good dollar to do it. This is not to say that business
is an easy sell or that good ideas abound about how net-video can be used.
A lot of hope is invested in network video's potential to reduce travel budgets and
travel time by delivering teleconferences and pictures over distance. Savings, goes
the argument of fervent evangelists, will flow partly to net-video and partly to the
bottom line of the business employing it. But as an early innovator of
teleconferencing and one who has experienced it from time to time over two
decades, I caution true believers that there's a generation or two still alive that is
heavily prejudiced against a technology that promises much but delivers
frustration.
"Business content means relevant information and knowledge," McLennan told
Terry's gathering. "To devise real business solutions using voice, video and data
we have to get right into the customers' premises in order to recognize needs and
then manage those needs in a way that provides real value.
"But it's not going to settle down in the next three to five years. You shouldn't be in
this business if you don't have deep pockets and you're not comfortable managing
change."
Terry Matthews smiles.
Tony Patterson, founding editor of Silicon Valley NORTH and formerly associate
editor of Financial Times of Canada, is a regular columnist for the Ottawa
Business Journal. He can be reached at tonyp@newvid.ca.
